BERGMAN'S PERSONA THROUGH A NATIVE MINDSCAPE
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Sjoberg was not as ignorant of Sjostrom's achievement and of avant-garde European cinema as his statement might suggest. But he voiced his views as a challenge directed at the contemporary Swedish cinema and during the peak of postwar neorealism. Above all, his essay was conceived as a justification for his own screen adaptation of Strindberg's play Miss Julie in which he was to depart drastically from Strindberg's naturalistic format. Sjoberg argued that the dramaturgical vision of A Dreamplay was much more relevant to him in filming Miss Julie because in A Dreamplay Strindberg had anticipated the development of the cinema. Sjoberg referred to Strindberg's vision and technique as "hallucinations-realism/' perhaps best translated as "fantastic realism/' Taking his dramaturgical cue from A Dreamplay, Sjoberg transformed Miss Julie into what has become a modern(ist) classic in the cinema. Parker Tyler includes the film in his volume Classics of the Foreign Film with the following comment: What is so remarkable about the filming of Miss Julie is the sheer aptness with which a first-rate, difficult dramatic text has been freed into real planetary space. . . . The filmmaker has taken up the play as a rich programme for bringing the past before us as literal hallucination.20
PERSONA A N D THE SEMINAL PRESENCE OF A DREAMPLAY
The way one of Strindberg's naturalistic plays could be transferred to the screen by employing his modernist dream concept remains Sjoberg's initiative and coincides with Bergman's formative years in the cinema. But Bergman's link to Strindberg dates back to his youth and constitutes a very personal referential point throughout his career. A Dreamplay in particular, has been a continuous challenge. He spends considerable space in his memoirs The Magic Lantern to discuss one of his Dreamplay productions. He has staged it three times in the theater and once on television. Its presence makes itself felt in the dream sequences in Wild Strawberries. Their dual quality of reminiscence and nightmare recall the